1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for electronic commerce, and more particularly to a system and method by which an electronic store (e.g., an “eStore” provided on a world-wide network such as the Internet) can offer a competitive price to a customer when there is another eStore that offers a competitive price, and the prospective customer is somehow aware of the existence of such a competition.
2. Description of the Related Art
Shopping over the Internet is increasingly becoming important and a prime way of doing business and conducting transactions. As the amount of Internet shopping explodes, electronic businesses (e.g., so-called “eBusinesses”) and eStores must address similar kinds of pricing issues that conventional stores face. One pricing issue is that of competitive pricing. A number of comparison shopping business sites have been developed (e.g., e-compare.com) which allows comparison shopping over the Internet.
A typical scenario is described below. A user looking for a book “Of Mice and Men” (or the like) visits the comparison shopping site and inquires about the book. The comparison shopping site keeps track of all eStores that sell this book. It runs a query asking for the price and shipping and handling cost of this book on each of these sites and lists the prices to the user in the form of a table. The table contains entries, such as shop name, base price, shipping charges, availability, etc. The user can immediately compare the prices and the other attribute(s) and pick one of the stores at which to shop. Such comparison sites also typically provide a “click-through”facility whereby the user can directly click on the Universal Resource Locator (URL) of the eStore that qualifies the user criteria and the user can shop at that store. In this manner, the comparison shopping business makes a commission for the referral to the eStore from the eStore from which the user buys the product.
This is a “win—win” situation for the customer since the customer gets the best price without actually visiting many eStores manually. The comparison shopper “wins” due to referral commissions, and the eStore in which the user buys the product or service “wins” because it obtains the business it may not otherwise have obtained.
However, a drawback with the above system is that other stores do not have a chance of winning even though they might be willing to bring the price down if they knew that there was a competitive offer. This is a problem.